The Best Indicators for MyTradingBuddy: What to Put on the Chart So the AI Reads It Right (and What to Leave Off)

The best indicators for MyTradingBuddy are the ones that add information the candles alone do not carry, drawn so a reader — human or AI — can see them at a glance. That is the whole rule. MyTradingBuddy reads the chart you have open on TradingView; a clean chart with three well-chosen overlays gets a sharper read than a chart buried under twelve. This page is the setup we recommend, why each indicator earns its place, the settings that work, and the ones that hurt more than they help.

The principle: the chart is the input

An AI reading a chart image sees exactly what you see: candles, lines, shading, labels. Anything that hides the candles (thick bands, five moving averages, a cluttered volume pane) hides the structure it is trying to read. Anything that adds a reference the candles cannot show on their own — where value is, how far price has stretched, whether the move has participation — makes the read better. So the test for every indicator is: does this show something the candles don't, and can it be seen without squinting?

Keep the price pane dominant (at least 70% of the chart height), one or two panes below at most, contrasting colours, and no more than about five drawn objects on screen.

The best indicators for MyTradingBuddy: the core setup

That is five, and three of them are drawings rather than oscillators. Together they answer the questions the consensus is built around: what is the structure, where is value, how stretched is price, where will it react, and is it a time that matters.

Worth adding for specific jobs

Volume profile (session or visible range). The best single addition for futures and stocks. The point of control (the price with the most volume) and the value area (the middle 70%) are where the market agreed on price; the low-volume nodes are where it moved fast and will move fast again. It lines up with order blocks and fair value gaps more often than not, and it gives the AI a why behind a level. Keep it as a thin side histogram so it does not cover candles.

RSI (14) in a small pane below. Use it for two things only: divergence at an extension level (price higher high, RSI lower high) and extremes on the higher timeframe (a weekly RSI above 75 is a stretched trend). Ignore the 30/70 lines as buy/sell signals; on a trending instrument they are early by weeks.

ATR (14) as a number, not a plot. It sets your stop distance and tells you when a session is unusual: an NQ day whose range is already 1.5× ATR by 10:30 am is not a day for a second setup.

MACD (12, 26, 9). Optional. It is a smoothed version of the EMA relationship above; useful on the daily for momentum slope, redundant intraday. If the pane count is tight, drop it before RSI.

Anchored VWAP from a swing (the last major low or high, or an earnings/news candle). Shows the average price of everyone who bought since that event — a strong reaction level that plain support/resistance misses.

What to leave off (and why)

• Bollinger Bands, Ichimoku, Keltner channels. Visually dense; they cover the candles and duplicate what VWAP bands and the EMAs already show.
• Every moving average beyond two. A 9, 21, 50, 100, 200 stack turns the chart into a ribbon and the AI into a guesser.
• Auto-drawn "smart money" indicators that paint every order block, FVG and BOS on every timeframe. Dozens of boxes, most of them noise; the consensus already identifies the ones that broke structure. Draw the two or three that matter yourself.
• Signal arrows and buy/sell painters. They tell the reader what to think instead of what is there.
• Heatmaps, footprint and DOM overlays in the same image as price. Great tools, wrong layer; keep them on a separate screen.
• Log scale on intraday (fine on weekly/monthly crypto and stocks; misleading on a 5-minute NQ chart).

Timeframe pairing

Indicators change meaning with timeframe, so pair them deliberately:

• Weekly/daily: 20 & 50 EMA, RSI, Fibonacci on the last leg, volume. This is where bias comes from.
• 4-hour/1-hour: VWAP (weekly-anchored on the 4H, session on the 1H), volume profile, the drawn levels.
• 15-minute/5-minute: session VWAP with bands, volume, session shading, and nothing else. Entries happen here; clutter costs the most here.

When you ask the consensus for a read, it blends what it sees across the timeframes with more weight on the higher ones. Give the higher timeframes the structural indicators and the lower ones the execution indicators, and the blend has clean inputs at every level.

A quick example

NQ, 10:00 am ET. The 1-hour chart shows price sweeping the overnight high, then closing back under it. Session VWAP is 60 points below; the 20 EMA on the 1H is flattening; the sweep candle printed the session's highest volume bar and the next two bars are thin; the 1.272 extension of the pre-market leg sits right at the wick high; volume profile shows a low-volume node between the high and VWAP. Five indicators, one story: the high was a stop run into a target, participation left after the sweep, and the path back to value is open. The consensus reads the same story because every one of those inputs is visible on the chart — and it names the level that says otherwise (a 1H close back above the swept high).

Set it up once

Build the layout in TradingView as a template — price pane with volume, VWAP, 20/50 EMA and session shading; one small pane with RSI; volume profile on the side — save it, and use the same one every session. Consistency is what lets you, and the AI, notice when something is actually different. Then open MyTradingBuddy on that chart and ask the six questions from when to use MyTradingBuddy. The trial is three days for $14.07: start it on your own chart.

Related reading

• When to use MyTradingBuddy: best times, timeframes, trend flips
• The 80/20 of reading a chart
• Early signs a trend is about to reverse
• AI chart analysis: what it actually checks

Nothing here is financial advice. Indicator settings are a chart-reading aid, not a signal. Trading involves risk.